San Francisco is the central character in The Chronicle's contemplative new comic

James Sullivan, Chronicle Pop Culture Critic

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Photo: Michael Macor

Image 1of/1

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 1

Madonna with a few of the drawings that will appear in his comics, including the Russian Orthodox Holy Virgin Cathedral, Spreckles Lake and Victorians along Broderick St. Quirky local cartoonist Paul Madonna will debut his comic strip, "All Over Coffee" soon in the Chronicle.
event on 2/6/04 in San Francisco Michael Macor / The Chronicle less

Madonna with a few of the drawings that will appear in his comics, including the Russian Orthodox Holy Virgin Cathedral, Spreckles Lake and Victorians along Broderick St. Quirky local cartoonist Paul Madonna ... more

Photo: Michael Macor

San Francisco is the central character in The Chronicle's contemplative new comic

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

Paul Madonna shuffles around his San Francisco apartment in corduroy slippers, working on his cartoon art. When he goes out to sketch, he has plenty of shoes to choose from -- a nice pair of Fluevogs, some favorite hiking boots, a well-worn pair of running shoes.

It's a far cry from his shoeless days, those penniless months more than a decade ago when he peddled his comics on Telegraph Avenue. On break from his studies at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, he whiled away a lost summer with two friends. Despite the fact that he couldn't afford BART fare then, the budding artist moved back to the Bay Area upon graduation.

The feeling of All Over Coffee, Madonna's new strip, which premieres this week in The Chronicle, is less intense than contemplative. But the attention to detail -- the chance detail of everyday existence -- makes for a potent kind of poetry.

We never see the main characters, Maurice and Sarah, whose oddly disembodied thoughts and utterances are inspired, according to the artist, by the novelist Margaret Atwood and the songwriter Elvis Costello. Instead, we see the dreamy San Francisco they gaze at from cafe windows and on their seemingly aimless wanders: winding neighborhood blocks, power lines over alley rooftops, gathering clouds.

Even after the critical breakthrough of the graphic novel and "serious" comics, there remains a bias against comic strips that aren't designed to tickle the funny bone, Madonna says. Searching for a home for his work, he was turned down by just about every weekly he tried.

"You're just not funny," one editor told him over the phone. Click.

Meticulously lined and shaded, All Over Coffee is vastly different than the confessional "alternative" comics Madonna was doing a few years ago. Those featured deliberately rudimentary characters, like Matt Groening's Life in Hell or the dark drawings of Gahan Wilson. The new work looks as if it were done by a different artist.

But he claims he has been taking abrupt turns ever since he started making pictures. In eighth grade, he was doing "photorealistic" drawings; two years later, he switched to abstract oil paintings.

"I'm whimsical that way," he says, sitting in the tidy workshop (formerly a sun porch) of the apartment the 31-year-old shares with his wife of two years, Joen. "Maybe stubborn is a better word."

For Madonna, the Bay Area held the usual promise of youthful free will, but it had more: It was the home of two cartooning heroes, Charles Schulz and R. Crumb.

As an only child, he spent his afternoons and evenings hanging around the restaurants and pizzerias his parents ran in Pittsburgh.

"I grew up sleeping under the register of the pizza shop," he says. "I'd be under the oven, reading Charlie Brown books."

There was never a question that he had the talent to draw, but he had less confidence in his storytelling skills. About six years ago, Madonna quit drawing.

"I spent a year and a half just reading," he says. "I fell in love with Dostoevsky. Went through a big Henry Miller phase.

"What I was doing, stories are at the crux of it. I wasn't the kind of person who becomes the storyteller at a party, and that really bothered me."

The education paid off. For one thing, he met Joen, a full-time student who also does marketing consulting out of the apartment, when she sent him an e-mail about a strip he'd photocopied and left in coffee shops.

All Over Coffee came to life when Hank Donat put out a call for cartoon submissions about San Francisco for his Web site, www.mistersf.com. Six installments ran there.

Creating the strip has renewed Madonna's appreciation for his sense of this particular place on earth. Taking his kit -- a featherweight stool he got from REI and a wooden box containing pens, ink washes and a little Maggie Simpson figurine -- out to the sidewalks of his adopted hometown, he makes time for the kind of reflection most of us don't allow.

"This a great time of year to draw," he said last week, looking out his window at the shingles next door. "The sun is off to the side, so you get these real dramatic shadows.

"I'm really looking at this place. I've been here 10 years, and I really have to look at it now."